Electric Vehicle Aggregation in a PV-Battery Charging Station: A Contract-Based Approach

As the proportion of high-power fast charging piles increases, how to more stably aggregate electric vehicles to avoid market risks brought about by user charging behavior is an urgent problem for charging station operators. This is especially so for fast charging station operators. To address this issue, a retail package design method for PV-battery charging stations based on contract theory and Lyapunov optimization is proposed in this article. The operator can formulate optimal charging and discharging packages under asymmetric information in the day-ahead and real-time stages. Packages with fixed power and prices will be offered to users to reduce the impact of user behavior uncertainty. In addition, the queuing problems of pile allocation and PV-battery energy management are resolved by the Lyapunov drift optimization method. The performance indicators, such as the average power and demand processing capability of in-station equipment, will be optimized while ensuring the stability of the queuing network. The simulation verifies that the proposed method can improve the operator's net income and make the social welfare approach the theoretical value under complete information. Moreover, it shows stronger stability in terms of user aggregation.